So which LNG plants will be going ahead and in what order in BC 2

2015 also marked the first year in which renewable energy installations surpassed those fo fossil fuels, adding further support to the argument that this is the energy future of the world is, while under the BC Liberals we are tying ourselves to fossil fuels for another three decades as it declines. Greatly helping the growth of renewables is the ongoing rapid fall in renewable energy prices.

Quote:

Renewable energy reached an important turning point last year with record new installations of emissions-free power surpassing sources that burn fossil fuel, according the International Energy Agency.

New installations of renewable energy overtook conventional power for the first time in 2015, the Paris-based agency said Tuesday in its Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report. Global green power rose by a record 153 gigawatts, equivalent to 55 percent of newly installed capacity last year. Total installed capacity exceeded coal for the first time, the IEA said.

“We are witnessing a transformation of global power markets led by renewables and, as is the case with other fields, the center of gravity for renewable growth is moving to emerging markets,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said. ...

The report shows the acceleration toward clean-power generation was already picking up pace before governments agreed in Paris in December to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Renewables will be the world’s fastest-growing source of electricity over the next five years, according to the report. ...

Renewables capacity will be supported by falling costs, according to the agency. Solar panels are projected to be a quarter cheaper over the five year forecast period ending in 2021. Onshore wind-turbine prices may drop 15 percent.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/record-green-power-in...

NorthReport wrote:

Shades of the 2013 BC election. Where's your hard hat Premier?   

Petronas Eyes New Island for $27 Billion Canada LNG Plan

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-28/petronas-said-to-eye-...

..a comment from the Unist'ot'en Camp

With a good arm you can literally hit Ridley Island with a stone from Lelu. The fact that the proponents (Malaysia Petroliam and the BC Government) are leaving the hereditary leadership from Lelu Island out of all talks shows that Christy Clark is completely ignoring the true stewards of the land. Instead she is undermining a Supreme Court of Canada court case ruling from 1997 called "Delgamuukw vs Queen". By further misleading elected Indian bands into land deal talks off of reservation lands she is deliberately fueling infighting amongst the Indigenous communities. This is her Legacy. Not her failed LNG empire.

The Mistress of Spin brings another breathtaking announcement to the people of the province. Once again she has basically told the FN involved in negotiations what the end result will be. She's a two faced lying sycophant.

As the article explains the numbers don't add up. IMO that is unless there is some unseen sweet honey flowing to the billionaire.

Quote:

“This is the first of 20 projects that are in the pipeline somewhere to go forward so far, and we are just delighted to be able to say that LNG in British Columbia is finally becoming a reality,” said Clark with a grin.

But odd to the local newspaper and the mayor of Squamish was the absence of the Squamish Nation band council. The project relies on the First Nation’s support, since the company has agreed to abide by the band’s environmental and economic conditions.

So where was the band? Abstaining on purpose, Chief Ian Campbell recently told The Tyee.

“The Squamish Nation chose not to participate in the announcement that would frame this project as a green light due to the fact that we’re simply not there,” said the hereditary leader, elected councillor and political spokesperson.

“To be candid, it’s misleading, and it’s not fully respecting the Squamish Nation’s process or our authority to work with the province,” Campbell said.

...

So far, Woodfibre LNG’s ownership firm in Asia — RGE, controlled by Indonesian billionaire Sukanto Tanoto — has authorized the funds for the $1.6-billion plant to move forward and has indicated that construction would start this year “pending permitting.”

Yet as of early 2017, there are no jobs posted to career section of the Woodfibre LNG website.

Howe Sound retiree Eoin Finn finds that odd for a $1.6-billion project that the premier said was “finally getting underway.” He’s a former KPMG managing partner who has studied the LNG project’s viability, and a well-known opponent of the project.

Finn believes Clark’s announcement was more of a stunt to “save her political hide” than a final investment decision (FID) in the usual sense.

He explained Woodfibre LNG is a privately held company, so the wealthy owner’s decision to proceed can easily be reversed. That’s different than FIDs made by large publicly traded energy companies, such as Petronas, Shell and Chevron, which are legally accountable to investors, he said.

“Why in earth would a smart fellow like Tanoto decide to spend money making LNG [in B.C.]? Where he says he wants it is in Southeast Asia, he can buy all he wants at much lower prices from Australia,” Finn said Sunday.

Then there’s the question of actual buyers. When Giraud was questioned by the Vancouver Sun on Nov. 4 whether Woodfibre LNG had any customer contracts to justify the project, he replied, “stay tuned.”

https://thetyee.ca/News/2017/01/04/PR-Stunt-LNG/

..not sure what you mean by "base" ken.

..but i don't see things being resolved just more manoeuvring to try and get around "consult" before the courts. i don’t know enough about the indigenous perspectives to make comment on the territories involved. i’ve just been able to gather a bit here and a bit there but i think the camp is justified in saying clark is "deliberately fueling infighting amongst the Indigenous communities"

eta: pipelines are still needed and pretty much all would run through wet'suwet'en and gitxsan territory that has rejected them time and again.

quote:

Petronas’s Pacific NorthWest LNG project would continue as planned with the liquefaction plant on Lelu Island in British Columbia. The company would move the docking facilities to neighboring Ridley Island, where ships would berth to take deliveries of the fuel for export, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.

Such a re-design would eliminate the need for a costly suspension bridge that was part of the original plan and also circumvent an environmentally sensitive marine area that’s been a flash point of controversy.

Right now the project has implacable opposition both on the Coast, and with Unistoten (who block the pipeline).

Getting around coastal FN opposition would isolate the Unistoten- and just eliminate the way the two oppositions feed off each other.

The occupation on Flores Bank for example would then be toothless for example. Petronas has enough potentional FN partners with solid territotial claims on Lelu and Ridley. Its not the same situation there as the Unistoten and the pipeline- no opportunity for a physical blockade against what other FN will sign on to (which is the case with the occupation at Flores Bank).

I'm not saying this will trump opposition- but it would make it harder.

On the other hand, changing the shipping terminal would mean exposing themselves to the risks from re-starting the environmental assessment process. THAT would be a big can or worms.

all in all, I think its a good sign Petronas wants to dodge to Ridley.

Ridley has always been there as an option. If it was as suggested about being cheaper to do, they would have gone there long ago.

I would not go so far as to say they are getting desperate. But the big picture is that deeking around, and needing to deek around, does not bode well for them. .... Regardless of whether my hunch is right that they are doing it mostly to try and leave some of the opposition behind.

If I'm right- they still have to make it work. All they will have achieved is giving up on Plan A. That doesnt make Plan B work.

..i'm listening to a live monteal no one is illegal radio interview with the camp. the camp is saying the proposed gas pipeline is being built for oil and not gas.

..new link to the archieve listen here. starts at 9:06

B.C. First Nation expected to launch court challenge of LNG approval

Members of a B.C. First Nation are expected to launch another legal challenge of a massive liquefied natural gas project proposed for the province's north coast.

Several hereditary chiefs with the Gitxsan First Nation will be in Vancouver today to announce their opposition to the Pacific Northwest LNG project, a project backed by Malaysia's state oil company Petronas.

The group's traditional territory is in northwestern B.C., near the area where a $11.4 billion LNG export terminal would be built close to Prince Rupert, B.C....

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/sec.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbi...

And away we go. There should be lots of good jobs here.

Woodfibre LNG applies for 40-year export licence

http://www.squamishchief.com/news/local-news/woodfibre-lng-applies-for-4...

Shell officially shelves plans to build Prince Rupert LNG project

Royal Dutch Shell PLC has officially shelved its plans to build the Prince Rupert LNG project, which had been planned for Ridley Island in British Columbia.

But the Anglo-Dutch giant will continue in advancing the $40-billion LNG Canada plant, another liquefied natural gas-export venture.

Shell had placed the Prince Rupert LNG proposal on the back-burner since it inherited the project through its 2016 acquisition of BG Group PLC. Earlier this year, Shell had said it was in the process of reviewing the combined Shell and BG portfolio, including the project located at the southern end of Ridley Island at the Port of Prince Rupert.....

Vancouver Island First Nation approves LNG plan

http://globalnews.ca/news/3336900/vancouver-island-first-nation-approves...

Three Fibs Premier Clark Uses to Sell LNG Dream

The more Christy Clark defends her dream of an LNG industry, the more she turns cold gas into hot air. The B.C. premier's interview with Andrew MacLeod published last week in The Tyee is a case in point. As MacLeod pressed with many LNG-related questions, Clark resorted to three big, bloated fibs.

quote:

Fib #1: LNG is 'clean'

While making our documentary Fractured Land about fracking in B.C., co-director Fiona Rayher and I journeyed to Cornell University to interview Dr. Robert Howarth. He is a global expert on the climate impacts of fracking.

We told him our premier has affixed the label "Cleanest Fossil Fuel on the Planet" to B.C. LNG (derived almost entirely from a massive increase in fracking in the province's northeast).

Howarth chuckled and said: "Your premier has her facts wrong!"

It is true that "natural" gas, an old euphemism for methane, burns cleaner than coal when you turn on your stove or fireplace at the end of the line. But when it escapes into the atmosphere before it's burned, it's some 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period....

Fib #2: The business case for LNG is solid

The Asian LNG market is in freefall. Prices that peaked at $18 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) just a few years ago are the reason we started down this path. Now they have plummeted to the $7 range today, with leading analysts forecasting $4-5 per MMBtu in 2016-17. Just to break even on gas fracked in northeast B.C., piped to the coast, compressed and loaded onto tankers bound for Asia, you need to fetch about $12 per MMBtu. It doesn't take a PhD in economics to figure out why. As The Tyee's MacLeod put to our premier, expert consultants like IHS Inc. predict "19 out of 20 planned gas export projects in the world won't be needed by 2025.".....

Fib #3: First Nations and communities broadly support LNG

Premier Clark maintains, "We've got pretty broad agreement from First Nations and communities along the way [for LNG]." The Tsawwassen First Nation's recent rejection of an LNG plant on their reserve is just the latest example of why that's simply untrue.....

Horgan: “I support LNG, provided the conditions are met”

B.C. Premier-designate John Horgan said today that he supports the province’s oil and gas industry, and the creation of a liquified natural gas industry, provided that the industry meets conditions.

quote:

When asked about how his conditions are different from those of her predecessor, Horgan stated that the former Premier spoke incorrectly about both his views and those of the NDP on the oil and gas industry. He gave the example of Shell Canada’s proposed LNG Canada project. “It has all of its permits in place, has social license from First Nations in the region, has the support of the community, and is waiting for economic conditions to turn around, and that project will proceed,” said Horgan.

On the topic of Pacific NorthWest LNG, Horgan said that First Nations participation needs to be complete, not passive. He explained that while there is a large amount of opposition to the facility being located next to Flora Bank, a habitat for juvenile salmon at the mouth of the Skeena River. “I know they’re working on trying to find a way around that. I think working together with the community, with First Nations, and investors we can find a better location. I want people to be embracing these economic opportunities across the board, and not just piecemeal.”

Fort Nelson First Nation Files Legal Challenge to Gas Pipeline Claiming It Will Threaten Caribou Habitat

A First Nation in northeastern B.C. is challenging the province’s approval of a proposed gas pipeline that would cut across critical habitat of threatened boreal woodland caribou.

Fort Nelson First Nation (FNFN) has filed for a judicial review of B.C. Oil and Gas Commission’s approval last month of a pipeline, proposed by Rockyview Resources Inc. and Shanghai Energy Corp., that would run through FNFN territory, resulting in 78 hectares of disturbance to caribou habitat.

“The 39-kilometre proposed gas pipeline cuts right through core caribou habitat in our territory, in an area with the most concentrated and highest-known use by boreal caribou for forage, calving, rearing and protection from predators,” said Lana Lowe, FNFN land and resources director.

“This area has been important harvesting grounds for our people, but, in particular, the area contains very important habitat for caribou, which our people have relied on for many generations to feed our families,” she said.

..under the libs, fed and prov, your right that lng trumped indigenous rights. new gov now though. if they are to be believed decisions will be made based on undrip.  

https://www.google.ca/amp/vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/vaughn-palmer-horgan-paints-framework-picture-to-make-lng-appealing/amp

I guess the morons in the BC NDP won't consider ammonia because the Toronto Sun published an article on it.

http://torontosun.com/2014/11/12/ammonia--the-real-green-energy/wcm/015a...

This would be a perfect replacement for LNG, and much cheaper to produce. If you actually study hydrocarbons, you will find that natural gas is much more difficult to find than oil.

For example, US natural gas reserves are 1,400 trillion cubic feet at 1.037 BTU per cubic foot, or 1451.8 trillion BTU.  By contrast its oil reserves are 36.5 billion barrels at 5,717,000 BTU per barrel, or 208.67 quadrillion BTU. Hence in terms of energy yield, there is 143 times as much oil as natural gas in the United States. In addition, natural gas is very expensive both on the production and consumption sides, and there is a very long time from the breaking of ground to its potential use. Nonetheless, natural gas has half the GHGs of coal and tar sands shit, whereas ammonia has zero GHGs.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/10/17/why-natural-gas-isnt-likely-to-be-...

In terms of BTUs, there is less natural gas than oil under the ground. However under the sea, there have been estimated about 1 trillion tonnes of frozen methane. Apparently this forms because dead stuff sinks to the bottom and then rots under extreme pressure. Apparently 360,000,000 years ago there was a natural global warming event which heated up the oceans considerably. The methane bubbled to the top, and everything on the surface caught on fire, destroying 99.9% of life. What could go wrong with mining undersea methane?

Resignation from the BC NDP

Please receive this as my official resignation as a member of the New Democratic Party, its provincial council and its Surrey-Green Timbers riding executive after seventeen consecutive years and a total of twenty years as a party member. I have served on constituency executives in Surrey, Burnaby, Vancouver and Toronto. I provided your party with a crucial endorsement that altered the campaign narrative during the 2001 election; I served as a paid consultant in 2002-03; I have recruited dozens of party members over the years; I have been attending conventions as a delegate from Forum 2000 with Ed Broadbent in 1985 to the 2017 Victoria convention; and, most recently, provided substantial assistance to the Surrey-Guildford GoTV operation that saw Garry Begg defeat Peter Fassbender.

I did all of these things based on the belief that the BC NDP had learned something from its near-annihilation in the 2001 election, that it would not return to office and repeat the mistakes of the 1990s. Clearly, such a belief was utterly unfounded. Rather, it seems that the brain trust that led the party to within a hair’s breadth of total destruction is back in the driver’s seat with a goal of re-enacting a style of governing even less appropriate for today’s BC than it was a generation ago.

It is not the 1990s anymore. The world has lost its appetite for centrist triangulation, Blairism and the Third Way. Nobody is looking for a BC NDP government to strike a course on minimum wage that places it to the right of Andrew Cuomo’s New York Democratic Party. Nobody is looking for a BC NDP to show it is serious by maintaining outlandish private school subsidies, subsidizing the oil industry through the LNG scam or completing WAC Bennett’s Two Rivers policy vision. One can no longer even make the case for the Third Way based on pragmatism.

I am forced, therefore, to reach one inescapable conclusion following Thursday’s $6 billion LNG subsidy announcement: the BC NDP believes that subsidizing transnational oil companies to increase fossil fuel exports is the right thing to do, that, in the eyes of today’s NDP, the global investor class who own and run companies like Petronas are more deserving of a break on PST than homeless people trying to replace their shoes. The NDP believes in these things because it is just another capitalist party indifferent to the global extinction event the capitalist system is producing. That must be why, for instance, the terms of reference of the government’s fracking study include the approval of continued fracking.

All the signs were there that this is where we were heading but I held on after the party enacted a fee to prevent poor people from seeking its nomination; I held on after the party approved Site C; I held on after the promise to keep BC’s minimum wage below New York’s, Seattle’s, Ontario’s and Alberta’s for the next four years; I held on after it became increasingly clear that the government is rigging the proportional representation referendum not just to fail but to discredit PR nationally for a generation.

Industry, government signing agreements with wrong chiefs

TransCanada’s press release about their Coastal GasLink pipeline project having 100 per cent sign on with all the elected Indigenous bands is an incredibly misleading statement.

What the average Canadian does not know is that some of those bands (band councils) only have jurisdiction within their reservation boundary while the hereditary chiefs have jurisdiction over the traditional territories. It’s the same as a municipality, like Smithers or Terrace, that only has jurisdiction within their city limits and can’t sign development agreements for projects in Telkwa, Thornhill or rural areas.

In the case of the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan, the hereditary system has been tested in court several times and has helped form the very laws from which most aboriginal rights and title cases have been based. “The Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs’ have never ceded nor surrendered their territory, nor have we lost it to war,” from time immemorial the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs mandate has been and continues today and into the future is to protect the land and its people. The Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs do not endorse nor support pipeline projects that threaten the health and well-being of our lands and our people.” –DebbiePierre, executive director of the Office of the Wet’suwet’en.

In a nutshell, the Band Council doesn’t have jurisdiction over traditional territories regardless of impact benefit agreements, so why is TransCanada touting this in the press as if they do? This isn’t about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing for Bands to sign on — I don’t begrudge any Bands for signing these agreements, as money is needed for all the work they have to do to support their communities.

What I do begrudge are the repeated efforts of industry and the complicity of the B.C. government in creating these deals with band councils when they know there are hereditary systems they need to consult. First Nations have won more than 200 consecutive court cases in Canada around this very sort of issue — governments failing to consult the appropriate First Nations leaders. Touting these signed deals in the press creates unnecessary division and conflict in communities that have already been pushed to the margins....

Blueberry River and the death by a thousand cuts

When Chief Marvin Yahey was a young man, he was a competitive bull rider. He spent more than a decade travelling the summer rodeo circuits across western Canada, licking his wounds from one farming town to the next. Now in his late forties and long retired from riding, the second-term chief of the Blueberry River First Nations (located about 1,300 km northeast of Vancouver near Fort St. John) is discovering that life as a political leader can be just as bruising.

Blueberry’s traditional territory is at the centre of one of the biggest deposits of natural gas on the planet, the Montney formation. In the space of just 50 years, their territory has been transformed, despite a 1900 treaty that guaranteed no such mass destruction would ever occur.

Oil and gas, forestry and hydro-electric power (among other things) have transformed the land and water beyond recognition: by 2016, more than 110,000 linear kilometres of roads, pipelines and transmission and seismic lines had been cut across less than 40,000 square kilometres of land. Faced with the destruction of their last critical wilderness areas, the chief, backed by his council and elders, is taking action.

Yahey is now the plaintiff in an unprecedented, on-again, off-again series of legal actions in B.C. that started in 2015. On behalf of Blueberry, he is suing British Columbia for the full sum of destructive impacts over the last 50 years — including the many smaller developments that a lawyer familiar with the situation called “death by a thousand cuts.”

The current Supreme Court of B.C. case, which claims the 1900 treaty has been breached, is unique because, instead of focusing on a single industrial impact, it is based on thousands of individual authorizations which have collectively degraded the land and water. And if successful, it has the power to transform the way First Nations, industry and governments plan and execute resource projects in this gas-rich region — and far beyond.

“This is one of the first cases where a court is being called upon to analyze and understand what the cumulative effects are on a territory from many different sources, and how this affects environmental sustainability moving forward,” says Chris Tollefson, executive director at Victoria’s Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation....

Foolish Leaders & LNG   -   by Judith Sayers

https://fnbc.info/blogs/judith-sayers/foolish-leaders-and-lng

"...Just when  you thought your opinion of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier [Horgan] can't go any lower, your opinion sinks to greater depths. We as a people need to be more vocal and proactive and fight for a world that future generations can live in. We don't want to be responsible for actions that cause hardship and heartache to them. 

Trudeau and Horgan will wear this decision and its effects but it is all of us who will have to live with it. These leaders may be fools but if we don't call them on it, we are allowing the foolishness. 

The time to act was yesterday and time is running out."

NDPP wrote:

Foolish Leaders & LNG   -   by Judith Sayers

https://fnbc.info/blogs/judith-sayers/foolish-leaders-and-lng

"...Just when  you thought your opinion of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier [Horgan] can't go any lower, your opinion sinks to greater depths. We as a people need to be more vocal and proactive and fight for a world that future generations can live in. We don't want to be responsible for actions that cause hardship and heartache to them. 

Trudeau and Horgan will wear this decision and its effects but it is all of us who will have to live with it. These leaders may be fools but if we don't call them on it, we are allowing the foolishness. 

The time to act was yesterday and time is running out."

Considering the abject failures of Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris Accords, one should be able to reason that overly ambitious political gimmickery designed to keep the more excitable elements of the environmental industry quiet is not working.

The simple reason for recent global population growth is that fossil fuel use makes it possible to feed the additional population.QQ And, attempting to implement grand strategies and policies that are against the grain regarding personal well being are non-starters.

Implementing strategies that address productivity constraints such as providing individual small solar systems are more effective but do not have the same capacity to engender that smug frission of superiority in politicians that save-the-world fantasies do.

ETA: In the meantime, the beatings will continue until morale improves!

Ah, the righteous outrage of a keyboard warrior whose only contribution to environmental concerns is.....righteous outrage.

Tell me, sage, if the world is consuming more than a hundred million barrels of oil per day and you agre with the premise that global population growth is inextricably linked to the need for fossil fuel products to produce enough food to feed them all, do only those that can pay get food?

I live off my investments ( and pay income tax there on). The reality is that all pension plans, especially the CPP invest in whatever generates the best returns and therefore all pension plan contributors and recipients are complicit in oil and gas investment. I know, I know....... ethical investing. Ethical investors are marks for stock pimps peddling crap.

Your welcome. And by the way, rabble took my dirty oil money. I am glad to assist in making divergent views known. Did you offer them any clean morally superior funds of your own or are you all morals and no money?

Its too bad we are consumed by ideology and blame games rather than working toward realistic solutions. Fortunately industry is working on solutions but it takes years to implement them while the more excitable members of the outrage community gnaw on about fantasies and political games.

 That gas was under immense pressure 

Any idea what caused this?

I thought it was thunder': Gas line explosion near Prince George, B.C., causes evacuations

Social media posts show orange fireball in the skies over Shelley, 15 km north of Prince George

A fireball rises from Shelley, B.C., a small community about 15 kilometres northeast of Prince George, after a pipeline explosion. (@Dhruv7491/Twitter)

Residents of a northern B.C. community are being allowed to return home after a natural gas explosion saw homes evacuated Tuesday evening.

Prince George RCMP said an incandescent orange fireball that could be seen for kilometres at approximately 5:30 p.m. PT was from an Enbridge natural gas pipeline exploding in Shelley, about 15 kilometres northeast of Prince George.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/prince-george-explosion-...